Honorius Augustodunensis
PL 172, col. 255C
English
And God said: Let there be light. When 'he said' is written of God, it is said after our manner, and the efficacy of the one commanding is expressed. But for God to speak is nothing other than to found all things through his Word. Through this Word he brought forth this bodily light from the element of fire, and brought it into this world. Which light then showed such a brightness as there now is before the rising of the sun; and it lit the waters, then thin, as it now lights the air. For twelve hours it remained above the earth, as the sun does now; and for twelve it lit the lower parts of the globe.
Fresh draft (Claude), approved by Wilson Pruitt · cc-by
Latin
Et dixit Deus: Fiat lux. Cum de Deo, dixit, scribitur, nostro more dicitur, et efficacia jubentis exprimitur. Dei autem dicere nihil est aliud, quam per verbum suum omnia condere. Per hoc verbum hanc corporalem lucem de elemento ignis protulit, et eam huic mundo intulit. Quae lux tunc talem claritatem, qualem nunc ante solis exortum, exhibuit: et tenues tunc aquas, ut nunc aerem, illustravit. Per duodecim autem horas super terram, ut nunc sol mansit: per duodecim vero, inferiora orbis illuminavit.
PL 172, col. 255C · pd
Notes
The physical answer at its most confident and most specific: the light is drawn from the element of fire, its brightness is that of the sky before sunrise, it lights the waters as light now lights the air, and it keeps a twelve-hour circuit above and below. Honorius gives no argument for any of it. Rupert, writing in the same years, describes precisely this opinion — that the light was nothing but an illumination of the air, alternating over twelve hours through three days — in order to demolish it.
A bodily lightA light like the dawn
Threads
- → echoes · Remigius of Auxerre
Remigius' twilight — 'not of the kind that now is, with the sun set above, but such as is wont to be before sunrise or after sunset' — becomes Honorius' 'such a brightness as there now is before the rising of the sun', with twelve hours above the earth and twelve below added. - ← parallel · Hugh of St Victor
Two Paris and Regensburg sentences of the same decade with the same physics: the light is the element of fire, separated out, carried round the world in a circuit like a luminous cloud, as the sun is now. - ← contests · Rupert of Deutz
Rupert states the physical reading with its details — an illumination of the air, twelve hours, three days, no luminaries — and demolishes it on a ground nobody else uses: every other day makes a substance that abides, and this one would make an unstable accident thrown over the air and snuffed out after three days, which is unworthy of the majesty that laid on sun and moon a decree that shall not pass away.